‘My very bad feeling just got worse,’ said Zoran. ‘How do you know all this about the American plans?’
Jimfish reassured him. ‘Because I am the first stage of the mercy mission — I am the harbinger of hope.’
‘More like the canary in the coal mine,’ said Zoran. ‘Let’s get out of here before the goons get back with new hostages and shoot us because they need the cell space.’
CHAPTER 25
Crouching behind a dune on the beach Jimfish and Zoran watched the first frogmen coming ashore. Under the full moon they looked in their wetsuits and flippers like walking fish. Jimfish remembered Port Pallid, the old captain who had been good to him and the great blue fish with four small legs that lived secretly in deep undersea caves, stood on its head, swam backwards and had lived on, quietly, successfully, for millions of years even though everyone was sure it was dead.
He knew, then, that it was time to go home. And yet what good would that do? When he had shot his future brother-in-law, as well as an American secret agent, plus a Minister of Education, and left his dearest Lunamiel to the mercy of a Liberian brigadier who wore nothing but his boots; and when the rage that his old teacher Soviet Malala — dead in distant Ukraine — called the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat had turned to tears and treachery, and his dream of arriving on the right side of history seemed as far away as ever.
As he and Zoran watched, three inflatable rubber landing craft packed with marines — their faces daubed black, carrying packs and weapons — slid out of the surf and on to the sand. It was then, as if the beach had been hit by a bolt of lightning, that night turned to day. The lights belonged to dozens of camera crews who had been waiting in the darkness.
The frogmen and the marines in their night-vision goggles were blinded by the lights and mobbed by men with important, carefully combed hair, speaking earnestly to camera. The cameras then filmed a short ceremony in which a banner was unfurled and planted on the beach; it read OPERATION RESTORE HOPE.
‘What are they doing with all these cameras and lights?’ Jimfish asked Zoran.
Zoran looked at his watch. ‘It’s prime-time evening news hour in the US. Big story: “Marines ambushed by the media in Mogadishu”.’
The marines forced their way past the anchormen and began digging in, and the film crews wheeled their cameras close up and followed every spadeful of beach sand. Jimfish felt sorry for the soldiers. You land on a beach expecting to kill or be killed and, next thing you know, someone shoves a mike at you and asks if you have a special message for your girlfriend watching at home in dear old Savannah.
Next on to the beach came the amphibious vehicles, rolling up the sand dunes with their drivers yelling at cameramen to get out of the way because there was a war going on. At this point, three Somalis rushed towards the marines, holding their arms above their heads, calling, ‘Don’t shoot!’
They were immediately thrown down on the sand and bound by the marines, while the cameras watched.
‘We are interpreters!’ one of the men managed to shout, before all were gagged and turned face down in the sand.
Zoran told Jimfish to be ready to run for his life. ‘Any minute now both media and marines will be ready to march on Mogadishu.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Jimfish asked.
Zoran looked at his watch. ‘We’re probably in a commerical break right now. The networks will want to see the troops in place outside Mogadishu, ready for the next segment of the show. Straight after the ads. That’s when the marines march triumphantly to the capital and the locals cheer.’
Jimfish was reassured to hear this. ‘So far, so good. Mission accomplished.’
‘So far, so bad and getting worse,’ said Zoran. ‘These poor guys haven’t a clue what they will be facing. Mogadishu is a mean town: lousy with burning tyres, burning rubbish, burning hatreds. Foreign invaders with nothing to gain hunting locals with nothing to lose. A recipe for disaster. These marines are on a hiding to nowhere.’
As he predicted, film crews, marines, make-up men, hair stylists and news anchors, still talking earnestly to camera, began marching off in the direction of the capital, under the banner, OPERATION RESTORE HOPE.
‘Now we grab one of those empty landing craft the marines arrived in,’ said Zoran, and made for the water.
‘What do we do about them?’ Jimfish pointed to the interpreters lying on the beach where the Americans had trussed them. ‘Let’s untie them. Then the two sides can talk to each other.’
‘What good would talking do?’ Zoran pushed Jimfish into one of the inflatables. ‘Who wants to hear what the other side is saying? Let’s get out — before this dialogue of the deaf turns into a dance of the dead.’
As they were floated into the surf, a squadron of helicopters flew overhead, heading for Mogadishu, and Jimfish was proud to be able to identify them.
‘Blackhawks. Most modern killing machine around, so I’m told.’
Zoran raised his eyebrows. ‘From what I’ve seen in ex-Yugoslavia, I’d say that prize still goes to a human with an enemy in his sights.’
Jimfish gave one last look at the three Somali interpreters still bound, gagged and kicking in the sand, and asked again if he could free them, but his words were lost as Zoran fired up the motors and they headed out to sea.
CHAPTER 26
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1993
The useful thing about a large, ribbed, inflatable landing craft with two good outboard motors and loaded with plenty of extra fuel, in methodical marine fashion, was that it carried Jimfish and Zoran well down the east coast of Africa to Mombasa in Kenya, where they took on more fuel and sailed south.
During their voyage from Mogadishu the news reaching them on the landing craft’s radio had been unfailingly bad. The dance of death Zoran predicted had grown into a grisly ball. Blackhawk choppers had been shot out of the sky and the mutilated bodies of American soldiers had been dragged through the streets to the cheers of onlookers. Throughout Operation Restore Hope, Somalis had gone on dying in large numbers, until eventually the Americans, along with international peacekeepers and aid agencies, declared that hope was not to be restored after all, and fled the country.
More and more often Jimfish found himself questioning the ideas of his old teacher Soviet Malala about rage, rocket fuel and the lumpenproletariat. It seemed to him as though many people were so poor and so hungry that rage was a fuel they could not afford; they were running on empty. The proletariat was not a class or category they would be allowed to join, and all they might expect was silent agony, speechless victims of the men in hats.
The two travellers arrived some days later in the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where their plan was to continue their journey by air. Their destination was South Africa, for Jimfish felt increasingly homesick and Zoran was as determined as ever to learn more about tribal homelands, ethnic enclosures and radical balkanization, as set out in the theories of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, of which six brand-new tribal reserves carved from the old Yugoslavia were, said Zoran, a triumphant vindication of the vision of the apostle of apartheid.
Jimfish explained time and again to the Serb that South Africa was now another sort of place where old obsessions with race and colour had been eradicated.
‘That way of life is gone, it’s dead and buried.’
Zoran said simply, ‘Perhaps. But your past is our future. If I study what you were so good at: racial division, sectarian hatred, ethnic cleansing and triumphant tribalism, I might begin to understand what we’ve achieved in my ex-homeland.’